SPEAKER_04: 0:00

Welcome back to Inspire AI, the show where we explore how leaders, creators, and change makers are embracing AI to future-proof their work and amplify their impact. I'm your host, Jason McGuinthe, and today's episode is about something AI can't automate. Your authentic voice. My guest is Judy Fox, LinkedIn strategist, entrepreneur, and creator of the LinkedIn Business Accelerator. Her work has helped thousands grow their online presence and convert visibility into real momentum. What sets Judy apart is her ability to lead with clarity and character, even in the face of disruption. In July of 2023, Judy's home and business were devastated by a house fire. It could have been the end. But instead, she rebuilt, restructured, re-emerged stronger. Using AI, not just to recover, but to reimagine how she runs her business, connects with clients, and protects her voice in a world filled with noise. Today we're talking about how AI scale trust, not just traffic. How to protect your voice when machines can mimic your tone. And how to take bold, imperfect action in a world that rewards volume over values. This episode is about staying real, staying visible, and staying intentional, even when everything changes around you. So let's dive in. Judy Fox, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44

Excited to be here. Thank you for that great intro.

SPEAKER_04: 1:48

Finally got you on. I'm super excited that you are here. Why don't we start by telling us a little bit about yourself and what brings you here today?

SPEAKER_01: 1:57

Well, I'm going to start by first saying yes, my name, my last name is Fox. So Judy Fox, and I'm going to put on my Fox ears for the better to hear you with. And, you know, I guess what brings me here today is over 20 years of working in the field of solving problems, business sustainability. I got my master's degree in sustainability and just watching the shift in the world with AI has a range of reactions. And the number one thing that I'll say is AI to amplify. So that that way you're yeah, that way you're not overwhelmed with, well, what can AI do? What can, you know, how do I get started? Even when I talk to people about somebody who's never touched AI, that's why I joke around. It can amplify. It can amplify the things that you're doing. It's not necessarily going to just take over unless you want it to, I guess, but um it's it's within your boundaries to test it, to play with it. It's just it's another tool online for us to spend time with and figure out.

SPEAKER_04: 3:24

Indeed, it is. All right. So you've described how a house fire in July of 2023 threatened your coaching practice. Can you walk us through the first AI-powered step you took to regain stability and how that step crystallized clarity for you?

SPEAKER_01: 3:43

Yes. First, back in 2023, I don't think I had even really played with AI at that point or even recognized what was coming. I don't know. I'm trying to think back through that moment in time, but it is a place where once I realized, I think it was around the fall of that year. So it was just a couple months after my house fire that a couple things happened. Number one, I got connected to a bunch of people who were using AI for different things. And the very, very, very first thing was they said you can use AI to help write code to scrape your emails. Like if I write code, put it in Google Apps Script, I can talk with my email to pull out all of my customer uh feedback forms. Because I was trying to tell people, hey, right after the house fire, I had a really hard time trying to discern all of my pipeline, what was happening with clients wanting to come into my business. Where do I pull to the top the best either applications, people I need to get back to, and how do I make those decisions? And so with AI, I was able to scrape all of that really quickly, all that data, because I think I had over 500 forms filled out, which uh is great for a business. Like I'm very happy that I have that many people saying, I want to work with you. But that in a crisis situation, you need help or support. And so the fact that I was able to do that with AI really quickly, put it all in a spreadsheet and then talk with it, I was blown away. I didn't know back then that I could leverage AI to help me write code to be able to do that. So that very first thing was so eye-opening to me.

SPEAKER_04: 5:45

Yeah, that's that's pretty powerful first use case for AI, uh, given that I think most people had learned what large language models were in um earlier that year, specifically when Chat GPT came out.

SPEAKER_01: 6:00

Yeah, what was the date when Chat GPT came out? Now I want to find it.

SPEAKER_04: 6:03

I think I think it was like November of 2022. Uh that's the that that's the month that stands out to me. And yes, I work I work I work on a chat bot, and um that was that's something that kind of just shocked us all how easily it was to to communicate to the to the model and get a fully like generated response of whatever clarity you're looking for. It was amazing.

SPEAKER_01: 6:31

Um, but I think I was trying to figure out when I I mean it it sounds like it said January 2023 is when it really exploded to 100 million monthly active users. So I think I probably was aware of and using Chat GPT, but even thinking back, I didn't really tip over to seeing beyond just chatting with it, probably, because I probably did chat with it because I understood immediately how I could use it to code. But I went to the place of really thinking, oh, this is something. There is I was always able to chat with something, but the idea that it could code for me just blew my mind.

SPEAKER_04: 7:18

Yeah. Yeah, I think I I listened to one of your other podcasts and it was Bardeen. Yes, if I'm not mistaken. So yeah, it it looked like it was uh code it and build your workflows. Probably like one of the first AI agent agentic AI software programs for um non-code developers, right? And that that sounds pretty amazing and very early in the early in the evolution here. Um I didn't even know these things could code until shoot Copilot came out, I think, in sometime in 2024. Anyway. Well, I was gonna say Yeah, that's an awesome start.

SPEAKER_01: 8:00

Yeah, I was gonna say the the driver was so visceral. Like I had so much pain that I was driven to hear, I I had my problem statement, it was so like I could feel my problem statement. It wasn't some like esoteric, like, let me try to vibe code something. Like I was literally in the middle of pain, in the middle of dealing with something that I said, I need to solve this right now. And because I jumped on these different group calls, because I've been a part of these different internet groups where I consider my peers to be always thinking, like trying to think 10 steps ahead. If you actually spend in the internet social media space where people recognize the power of being early adopters, because that you can be early on tools and on um what's happening in the world, you're gonna stay ahead of your competition, you're gonna stay ahead of your um, you know, you're gonna be prepared for what's coming out next. And so that was the point. I join a lot of calls like that with my peers. These are just private calls or friends, people I've known for six, seven, eight years. The power of that is what I just described being able to say, Hey, I'm going through something. What do you all think? And that's when somebody was like, Oh, did you know you could code? Did you know you could do this? So yeah, it was pretty, I like you said, it was early on.

SPEAKER_04: 9:42

So yeah, and not only that, but you you had a very powerful drive behind that. Your motivation was to get back on your feet. So that you know, why statement, if you will, and problem, you know, that you were dealing with, um, you leaned into your network to find out what what opportunities there are for you to get back on your feet and and you went at it. So it it's a lot easier. I wouldn't say it's easier, but it's a lot more um effective to go in with the uh the proper mindset than to just go in and experiment with things and see what it can do. Because, you know, if you don't have that drive, that motivation behind making it useful for you, then like you did, then you probably won't get as much out of it. So yeah, I definitely think that is uh very powerful.

SPEAKER_01: 10:30

I was gonna say if anyone needs a visual of what that even physically looked like in my home, is my house was torn down to the studs and the subfloor. And when I say torn down, I literally was able to plug the internet back in when they got power back up and running. And I'm I'm taking a Zoom call with a group, you know, on top of construction boxes and chaos, and there's, you know, workers all around. And I'm like, how do I vibe code? Like, how do I do this? So it really was that I'm sitting on a subfloor with my computer on boxes, and nothing exists around me except for you know the bones of a home.

SPEAKER_04: 11:15

So and as they say, necessity is the mother of an invention.

SPEAKER_00: 11:20

So it's very, very true.

SPEAKER_04: 11:22

Okay. So, what was one unexpected outcome of activating AI right after the crisis? Something that either surprised you or reshaped your business strategy?

SPEAKER_01: 11:33

Well, I'm gonna jump forward to now. So from 2023 now to 2025, the way that I think of AI now or how it's been able to impact or reshape my business is now in the space of we've spent a lot of time throughout all of history where you don't know what you don't know. Like, and so how do you find out those things you don't even physically know? How can you ask? And what I found powerful is because of AI, I'm able to upload and talk with it about my business and what I structure, and then just say, you know, this part of my business I don't really like. What ideas are there? And so I'll give a shout out to Andrea Goulet, who's been able to come over to my home and we've been able to work together. And because of her knowledge and my knowledge and AI, we were able to talk through some of the things I wished I could improve. And we like I was able to create new business structures, new offers, new ways of thinking that I just don't think I like it seems obvious in hindsight, but when you're in it and you say, But I've always done it this way, AI comes in with the knowledge of two people. I can't even imagine if you got like a room of experts in to say, here's all the ways you can run a business. And I didn't even realize there were ways to structure business to make it work in a different way, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_04: 13:08

No, totally. Yeah, I think intuitively I I I run through the same kind of aha moments when I use AI to come up with new ideas for you know personal projects or even the podcast. When I you know think about my own personal journey of the knowledge or growth that I've taken on with AI and say to myself, okay, how do I get more intentional about learning this technology? Because I want to stay ahead of the curve. I'm in tech, and every six months my my job's gonna change and I need to stay ahead of the curve. And this stuff is changing so often so fast that uh I want to be structured in doing it myself. And I think that the podcast allows me to learn more faster than I would if I had uh an unintentional like source of training or learning paths. But this is like like using the technology to uh to evolve your own mindset around whatever it is that you care most about, that's where the power is. And when you said it was like having two or more experts in the room, to me it's it's almost like taking the the expertise from the entire world and providing that to you on the on the topic. And you know, you can determine whether or not it's uh too much for you to to leverage or uh if you need to go in a different direction very quickly because of the amount of ideas that you can bounce off of it, um, making your process, whatever it is, very, very effective. It's so much fun to to riff with it, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 14:51

Yes. And I think that's why even just having one person that you're co-collaborating with, so you have this 1,000 people in a uh prompt moment, but you also, when you had me and Andrea like working co next to each other in person, there was just some magic that felt like I might say something to AI or I might uh have a way of questioning it. And because she is gonna ask things differently than how I would say it, just because we are two totally different humans, we ended up getting, I think, faster and better responses because it is only going to, even if you say it's got a thousand people in there all ready to be an expert, it's only gonna be kind of as good as the prompts and the questioning. And it just felt like our two different mindsets, because I come at things differently being an engineer, and she has a different background than me. We have a reaction that I think number one, it's helped me, and I think in reverse, it's helped her to open doors that we didn't even know we could ask to open in a way that we've now framed it. So I'm sounding cryptic. I can tell you what the answer is, but the answer could change between even launching this. But I will tell you one of the things I didn't think about is how to merge milestones that my clients want to the results I knew I could get them and make that the product. So, say for example, my client wants to reach 10,000 uh followers on LinkedIn. I can now connect that in a contract to say, okay, we reached$10,000. That's my like milestone bonus, if that makes sense. And that sounds obvious now in hindsight, but during my um experience of growing an online business, I'd never really merged that financially, or that's a win for the client, and then it becomes a win for me, and they're paying for the actual results.

SPEAKER_04: 17:04

Yeah, yeah. I I I'm kind of just off the cuff here thinking based on your anecdote with Andrea Gooley, did I meet her at the okay, yes, I I remember the name. Okay. I feel like there's an evolution to prompting these systems that not many people have really thought about or used or explored much of. When you put two uh human minds in a room trying to solve a problem and tackling that with the tooling of a large language model, I feel like you can definitely get more out of that. I just I don't know how, but it sounds like intuitively you've you've you've hit on something that really exists and probably should be explored more often. Um wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 17:57

I was gonna say one thing she said to me and that we both, you know, kind of came together on. I think it's hard when you're merging two people to be like, where did this, but where did this thing come from? But the power of what she said one time was it's it's a mirror. And so if you're looking at a mirror and it's gonna meet, it's it's got my brain because I'm in the mirror, it now has me and her looking into the mirror to say, okay, mirror back to us what you see, but then make it shinier. Make it, it's almost like putting a filter on a person when they look in a mirror, and you you intuitively, I understand that concept. I can go on Snapchat, I can put a filter on myself. And then I was like, that is truly what AI is doing when I'm interacting with it. It's just putting on these different filters of think like a business CEO who runs a multi-million dollar business. How would you approach this problem? Now think like a uh digital marketing expert who has 10 channels. What would you do to push out this podcast to 10 different channels? When you tell it to do that, it's that it's a Snapchat filter. I'm just saying, here's the filter, put that on, and now talk with Judy Fox because you really can only be mirroring me, but it's got the filter of a lot of people, like you said. I loved the mirror concept because I was like, oh yeah, I'm just talking to a mirror.

SPEAKER_04: 19:29

That totally works, and I'm stealing those ideas.

SPEAKER_01: 19:33

Yeah, now you can credit me and her.

unknown: 19:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_04: 19:37

All right. So you've you've definitely generated millions of views via the LinkedIn business accelerator method that you created. How are you integrating AI today to ensure authenticity and engagement, but not just scale?

SPEAKER_01: 19:54

Uh, so I will shout out another client. I just looked at her numbers yesterday. The posts that we did the other day hit 77,000 views. So when people say yes, so we're gonna probably hit 100K on one post. And the power of that is not only visibility, but people are going and looking at her profile. They're following her, they're clicking on her links. 100,000 people seeing one thing that you've told to the world and it was positioned with business in mind, that is powerful. And that is, I mean, people are paying for that for advertising, and they're not hitting 100K on one piece. So I will say, how do I do that? Is by turning back around to all of the successful content that I've seen go out into the world on LinkedIn for the past 10 years and leveraging human psychology. Because if you say to yourself, how are you ensuring authenticity and engagement? We as humans don't change. So one, and I go through, I love human psychology and all the uh effects that we are drawn to. So, this particular post, what I do is I pull out psychology effects for people's content strategy. So, this one is called the IKEA effect. If we build it with you, we'll feel invested in your journey. And how do you actually do that in a post? I mean, I you'd have to pay me, but I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_04: 21:36

No, you you should you shouldn't be. I mean, that's that's the reality of it.

SPEAKER_01: 21:40

But if you really think about it, that's the thing that I think people are missing when they try to say, hey, do my content. Well, what psychology moment are you trying to pull on with your audience? Not in a trick, not in a get one over on the audience, but if you're craving, I want people to engage with me, did you consider what natural psychology we're drawn to? We all want to attend a birthday party, for example. What effect is that? Like all these social proof and things that we're drawn to. Like I said, the one that I pulled on for her account was called the IKEA effect. I love that one because it's how do you position something so it makes us, the audience, feel like we're building something with you? And if you can do that on a piece of content, you're gonna hit 100K. People are still wanting that. And AI can help you do that if you know to ask for it, if you know to talk with it about it, if you know that is the goal to maintain real voice, what you want to say, and don't just let AI write a post because AI doesn't know that unless you say, Hey, I want to come up with the top five psychologies on LinkedIn or on any social media platform. And how can I talk with my audience knowing the behind the scenes is going to be driven by a natural human psychology?

SPEAKER_04: 23:10

That's fascinating. I I honestly didn't think we're getting into human psychology here, but exactly why. And some of the best posts that I've noticed on LinkedIn in the last year have had that touch. They've they've really connected with you like as a human, as an authentic voice, whatever you're conveying. And these are my words, right? Um which obviously uh if I'm gonna be more effective in LinkedIn, I want to look, I want to learn the vocabulary that you have, right? I wanna I want to get it and I want to be able to articulate it right back. Um but at this moment in time, I I only um I only see what you're saying uh at the surface level because you know I've noticed it, but I haven't had like the words or the the understanding of what I'm seeing. I just recognize it when I see it. You know, it's it's very interesting what you're saying, and I'm I'm learning so much from you. So thank you for sharing.

SPEAKER_01: 24:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 24:06

All right. So now I'd like to get into a little bit about mentoring. If you were mentoring another business leader today and they said, I'm overwhelmed, but I know I need to act. What one uh AI first action can they take now to build clarity?

SPEAKER_01: 24:24

I do get a lot of people telling me they're overwhelmed in general, so that is a really good question.

SPEAKER_04: 24:29

The from me, from me, like action wasn't a word until I heard a great motivator. I'll I'll leave the name off here, but they said if you if you have a vision, you you must qualify it with action. And if you don't act, then you're gonna leave great intentions behind. So here, like I feel like taking massive action on whatever it is is just about like step, not the first step, but step one and a half. You you can't move forward without acting. And so like that that's the the piece that resonates most with me is be always moving in the direction you want to go. So if you aspire to be something or do something, you've got to act toward that in order for it to become a reality for you. Um and not just sit and hope for the day that it'll kind of land in your lap, right? Like that that's what this question kind of speaks to me for. What does it say to you?

SPEAKER_01: 25:35

Yeah, I was gonna say the it pulls me back again to um the two challenges I faced that created real limitations on me. So a lot of times we are swimming in abundance. We have so many things we either could do, and that's why this idea that what is one AI first action they can take now, that creates that limitation. What is only one thing you could do? And I actually think that's interesting because that is what I would actually say in reverse, which is if you're overwhelmed but you need to act, if you even leverage your to-do list, for example, and you upload all the complex factors, even if that means you get on a Zoom call to yourself, just so you can record what you needed to say and just get it off your chest. Here's all the things I'm overwhelmed with, here's all the venting I want to do. You take that transcript, you upload it to Chat GPT, and you literally say, What is one thing that you can pull to the surface that I need to do now? It causes a forced limitation. And you have with AI, you have to force your own limitations back on yourself. So I had forced limitations by going through a house fire. And then, of course, not to add uh trauma to the call here, but the uh I broke my upper arm right here recently. So it's not even that long ago, which I don't even think I mentioned. I tripped and fell just walking my dog and broke this bone in my, it's called the humorous bone. It was not funny that I broke it.

SPEAKER_03: 27:21

No, no, no.

SPEAKER_01: 27:22

I don't know why they call it the humorous bone, but um the I lost the ability to use my right arm, which completely shifted my need on AI. So I leaned into AI even more. Like all of a sudden, I went from okay, I had a house fire, great, now let's break an arm and break your dominant arm. So I went into I believe in forced limitations now. Hopefully, I don't break anything else. But anytime you can limit yourself, you're gonna get clarity. Like just period, especially in the age of AI. AI makes you feel like you have the world at your fingertips and you have to force the limitations.

SPEAKER_04: 28:06

Wow. I've learned something new.

unknown: 28:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 28:11

Yeah, I didn't quite understand what force limitation meant from your story until that last part. That really kind of jumped out at me. I see like the world using AI through AI's eyes can provide so much, and it uh in and of itself can be overwhelming to dig through what it's providing. But if you narrow your focus and use AI as a as the tool to help you narrow your focus, you're gonna get a lot more out of that particular solution you're seeking.

SPEAKER_01: 28:44

Yeah. So forced limitations can look like in real life, what it looked like for me was I broke my arm, I couldn't drive for three months. So during a period of time where you can't drive and you really are, you know, running your business, you're doing all these things, I started having to just make phone calls, which is why I mentioned Andrea a lot because I called her. I said, You're local, you're here, you want to come over my house. Like, because I can't go anywhere, I can't do anything. I can't sit on a Zoom call easily because I was in pain. So I said, anyone like I had a whole poll on people to be like, come on over my house. And she took me up on it. And and then that's when, like I said, you because of forced limitations, you get results that you didn't even know were possible. But when you don't have any limitations and you're just like, I need to start with AI, well that's unlimited. So that's why I'll say, even with AI, you might just force yourself to say for the next 30 minutes, I'm gonna chat with AI, I'm gonna put a boundary around it, a time boundary, a networking boundary, a tool boundary. I'm Only going to play on this one tool for 30 minutes, see what I can do, see what it can do for me. Because a lot of times I think we just swim in overwhelm.

SPEAKER_04: 30:09

Awesome. So speaking of being overwhelmed, and when we use AI to write like us, comment like us, and even speak like us, what's your take on how professionals should protect and project their real voice when AI can generate content at scale?

SPEAKER_01: 30:28

Uh I'll just start with I once a month having a way to connect with people in a real way is powerful. So I'll say I've because of AI and because of everything I went through in the last couple of years, I've increased my in-person networking. Because AI can't be me. AI can't show up at an uh AI ready RVA event and wear the fox ears.

SPEAKER_04: 30:55

So we cannot.

SPEAKER_01: 30:58

And I mean, think about like just even how we met and how like that is something AI just cannot do. So I will say the number one thing I'll say is the best way to protect yourself is to start showing up for in-person things. And that can only just be once a month. And then it says, how can we do that when we generate content? Because if you're in person, and I love how conferences and group gatherings can take group pictures, can post real images that are not AI generated of people gathering. That is powerful for also if you're in person and you're getting your photo taken and you're out and about, all of that equates to you are a real human showing up. And so if you do that consistently, if you do it once a month, it doesn't even have to be that often, you're going to stay more relevant and real when, like you said, AI can generate content at scale. The other thing I'll say is even if there's something in your business that you can do once a month that's online, whether that be a live stream, a podcast, something that feels like AI can't easily replicate it, you're better off doing one pillar piece of real content than trying to push out a hundred posts this month.

SPEAKER_04: 32:24

That makes a lot of sense. Um, I I read a lot of Medium articles and recognize that these people they they say all the time, I I need to pump out content. And maybe they're using AI, maybe they're not, but that's their like primary objective is to get content out there so that more people can see it and then it like builds off of itself and the and the it's a it's a perpetual flywheel of of content connection generation, right? And they thrive off of that, and they they build business models off of it. So it's a little counterintuitive to say spend less time on the scale of your content and more time on the quality. But in a world where gosh, I just spoke like an LLM there. Um I'll say in a world where uh there is so much AI at scale, you should think about the quality. Yeah. You you need to start pushing back on that because you you know, if you if you allow that to consume you and become your working model, then you know, you're easily replaced by guess what? The AI.

SPEAKER_01: 33:45

I know. And if you think one of the things I've noticed is the people who are pushing back against AI slop is what I would call the mass production of AI produced content. It is just AI talking with AI. It may come from every once in a while. I I don't want to throw out the AI with a bathwater, haha. But the the AI tool, if it is coming from your thoughts, your voice, like if we took this transcript of us talking and we said, hey, AI, only use the words that came out of me and Jason's voices. What did we actually say? Turn our actual words into content. That to me is not AI slop. That's being based on the actual words that came out of our mouths. And AI supported making that happen because it had the transcript. And as long as it followed that rule of only use words that physically came out of our mouths, and in the order that we said them, don't mix up the words because then we can say anything. But that is powerful use of AI, and that's not to me AI slop. It becomes AI slop when it's AI iterating off of AI, iterating off of AI, iterate. It's like that photo of a photo of a photo of a photo, it's starting to look fuzzy and yucky and nothing, and there's no realness to it. There's no story, there's no, or it can fake a story. It can be like, I got fired last week. You didn't actually get fired, but like AI can create some weird things and say weird things as you get further and further out into the AI slop. And I think you're gonna lose. If you really want a quality audience with a future, you're gonna avoid generating content at scale that's AI generating off of AI. Content at scale from a real conversation. If you if once a month you focused on having a real conversation and you took that and generated some content from it, that's awesome. That's a great use case. But this other way of just out of the blue generate with AI, that is terrible because I think I think people are smart enough and we're also starting to be very leery of oh, that's probably AI. If we see something that we think is AI, we don't even want to put our stamp of approval on it.

SPEAKER_04: 36:23

That's fair. Yeah. I I did a podcast episode a while back on how the education system is changing for students specifically, and how they're I think they're being expected to use AI technology to support their learning. Instead of starting with, like you said, the AI. I I figure you should start with the draft, right? Instead of the saying, write me an essay on Benjamin Franklin, you should write your own essay and tell ask AI to help you polish it or incorporate some some facts that you found highly interesting about his personal life or whatever, and you know, that sort of thing, um, so that you don't get you know an outcome that wasn't you, uh you won't even remember, remotely remember as a student. Like what's the point of even writing that essay if if you didn't put any effort into learning anything, right? So I think I I definitely hear you and and content creators, I'll say I I'll call I'll consider myself one now. Um it took me a while to fill those shoes, but uh as a content creator, I I feel the urgent need to create the content so that I can support my audience growth and keep them happy, but I also find it to be of the utmost importance to keep framing it around my own voice, not the voice of you know the masses, um, as it's quickly, quickly getting watered down by more and more uh generated content in the world around us.

SPEAKER_01: 38:10

So yeah. Um I like we've talked about the I think quality is gonna win out over quantity at some point, and people are not drawn to I think oh how do I say this? Um some of the accounts that are pumping and dumping tons of content out into the world are also leveraging AI bots to like and comment. That's that's and I will tell you to me, that's the biggest red flag. And but it's happening, and it's happening with large, potentially successfully looking creators and that are getting on stages. And and so I just want to pause people to kind of look with a little bit more discernment. If you see someone pumping a ton of content out there, they look popular, they're doing the selfies, they look like they're just just pause, just kind of realize that the possibility that AI bots are the early likes and comments and reposts, and they're falsely amplifying their own voice. I don't know how we compete with that other than come over to me because I know I'm doing 100K on a post, one piece of content. And it's the only thing I can say is I've learned through the conversations I'm having, those people who falsify their results at the beginning of their post based off of AI content are not seeing the click-throughs to their links, they're not getting the real thing on the other side of amplifying their voice.

SPEAKER_04: 39:58

Yeah. I will try to channel your advice there going forward whenever I think about these things and read other people's posts.

SPEAKER_01: 40:07

And it's tough out there. It is I've I see it's easier on the other side of an A uh content push-out. There's AI comments, there's AI likes, and there's even AI reposts now where people, there's a bunch of companies that were generated with um, I guess they purchased followers.

SPEAKER_02: 40:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 40:29

Ooh, it's getting tough out there. I don't know how the platforms are gonna um combat against it. I know it's gonna become AI slop talking to AI slop.

SPEAKER_04: 40:40

Yeah, well, it it's a it's a dangerous world of misinformation and uh I would say misuse of misplication. Uh yeah, missamplification. That's what you just said.

SPEAKER_00: 40:50

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 40:52

Yeah, because you're you know, fake fake followers, fake fake information supporting you. Like, what is real in this world?

SPEAKER_01: 41:00

Um the thing I'll say in a positive direction is there's people, there's first of all, there's podcasts like this. We are real. I mean, hello, I'm real. I can pinch myself. And I will say, follow those threads, lean harder in on people who promise to stay real, to like my clients. I only work with people right now who promise to be like, I'm not gonna buy bots and I'm not gonna buy fake followers. I want to be able to confidently say I got that person results, because that matters for me and my business. So there's still the ability to have real conversations with real people on the internet. I think the world of curating accounts, of curating conversations, coming up with the top 10 list of this and top 10 list of that, that's gonna be so important in the world of AI.

SPEAKER_04: 41:56

Yeah, totally. And you personally have built such a reputation and network around building these highly customized systems, um, namely your LinkedIn accelerator that gives many, many people repeatable uh results. So what would you say are some ways you're using AI today to scale human connection, not just the content volume?

SPEAKER_01: 42:22

Um, I mean, one way is AI can help you take a lot of data, like I said, around just your forms that you receive, maybe from your website, or it can take any kind of, you know, recordings that you do with your clients. And because the one problem that one client has is the it's probably going to resonate with all the other clients, or it's gonna resonate the answer that you have for one person is gonna resonate for the answer to another person. So I think the power of recognizing that, using AI to do that, I've been able to generate better, I would say, playbooks and more systems that can start from a place of collective. Hey, we're all going through this. Hey, we all want um more visibility on a piece of content and not get sucked up into the AI game. So, how do we do that? Okay, Judy has her top five or top 10 human psychology levers to pull. And I'm just kind of realizing each person needs to look like they make sense to their audience because you wouldn't say it the same way over here to this person and this person's audience, but the human psychology lever is the same. And I think AI can pull that through to help me understand well, what was the common denominator for why both these things went viral or why they both worked? How can we make that work across all of the clients that I'm working with? So I think, like I said, you can customize it not because I need to customize human psychology, that stays the same. Let's then customize on top of something that does stay the same.

SPEAKER_04: 44:15

Yeah. Well, just just pulling on that thread a little bit more. How do you build these custom systems around people that yes, they're humans and psychology, psychologically driven in one way or another, but they're still different, right? So how do you how do you look at a client and uh take what's what's special about them from a human connection perspective and pull that out and and leverage that within the AI or agentic system for you?

SPEAKER_01: 44:49

Yeah, I guess the uh, you know, the ability to kind of say, okay, this client is in the financial industry, they have a B2B language they need to be pulling. There's best practices, I would say, that you can come up with a list of that client's best practices. They may not want to upload a video on LinkedIn that follows the best practices that a person who's a TikTok creator would do. But the human psychology of what it takes to start a conversation is still potentially the same. For example, trust. As I, as a brand over here in the B2B space, I promise, whether you say that promise or not, your team or somebody on the team for the company promises to always respond to the people commenting. So there's these threads that you can pull through that start to scale that feeling of what do humans want? Like humans want to be seen and heard. Well, then how do you pull that through? Your content can look totally different. It can be very polished, it can be B2B, it can be maybe even a horizontal video where it's not a vertical video like a TikTok or a short video content creator wants to look over here on a B2C side. And they, their language has more casual tone, but the promise of seeing and hearing each audience can still be the same. Maybe you promise to see them and it's a little more polished on the B2B side. Maybe the response from the company shows up as the company page logo, not a human logo. And over here it is the original content creator, or it is maybe they have a team and they have a team member that shows up and says, Oh my gosh, thank you so much. Like I've watched big accounts like Sarah Blakely have her team respond and they'll say, you know, kind of uh from Sarah Blakely's team as a little signature, because we know it's probably not going to be Sarah. She's probably pretty busy to be replying to likes and comments. But if the team replies, it does help boost and continue that promise of scaling. So when you say how do we scale human connection, it still is available to us, just how we position it.

SPEAKER_04: 47:15

Yeah, and just back to what what you've been saying or always say is action creates clarity. So how would you, or how do you see AI helping people take those early clarifying actions, whether it's testing voice, repurposing ideas, or publishing confidently?

SPEAKER_01: 47:36

I think from being an engineer and having that here's a theory, here's what we want to test, here's the action we're gonna take. And because we can come back into AI and use a huge model that can look at all this data that we could gather. Back in the past, the action creates clarity. We may not have been able to look at all the actions. Maybe we would have a spreadsheet or we would have um a software tool to look at all the actions. But today, now we I think the clarity is even greater. So now it's like create lots of action and see what actually worked. Because now we can, from a content creator standpoint, you can create a lot of different A-B tests. You can push out, let's do this video style. Let's now try this, let's do, let's iterate a couple things. And because of AI, you can put all those iterations and test cases and theories and all the boundaries and things you decided to do and tell AI to kind of pull out the threads and what does it think is the next action to put the best puzzle pieces together. I think that's really cool.

SPEAKER_04: 48:52

Very yeah, you can learn so much by experimenting, whether you're you know experimenting with a process or a technology, um, you know, a new way of thinking, maybe building new habits, like the yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 49:06

I think that's where pulling in a scientific background is important because you know when you're running experiments, you need to hold um, you know, a control case. You need to have your experiment outlined in a way that you can actually be able to look back on the results and get that clarity.

SPEAKER_04: 49:30

The scientific method, is that what they call that? I guess it's been so many years.

SPEAKER_01: 49:34

Um I know.

SPEAKER_04: 49:35

I yeah, people use the term hypothesis at work all the time. My hypothesis is it's it's funny, but it's real, right? And it and it works.

SPEAKER_01: 49:46

So I think like you said, in in an age of data, and the fact that we can use AI to look at our data, it's I think it's so cool, but also it becomes even more important to have created a really good hypothesis or your theory.

SPEAKER_04: 50:03

There it is. No, that's what that that that works, yeah. So, what what might be an example of someone using AI in your accelerator program to break through analysis paralysis? I like to say, and what made that a win?

SPEAKER_01: 50:20

Again, I'm gonna keep I keep going back to human psychology, but I had a client recently have Keep bringing it. I have a client that recently said, I have so many things that I need to either post about, talk about. Um, and what I ended up saying to them is you make a list of all your wants and your needs. All like a huge data dump. Just dump it, just tell me all your wants and needs. Because what we really need to do is actually think through how you're going to make people feel, and that's harder to so you say, I want my podcast to get more downloads, I want uh my um my next event to have more attendees, I want like there's so many wants and needs over here, yeah. But on the other side of that is the human connection piece and saying, So when somebody's saying, I have this maybe analysis paralysis around all these wants and needs, because the list was pretty long. I love that people have tons of wants and needs because that's a good signal of like thriving and wanting and hoping and striving. And then to break through the analysis is to just realize there's only maybe four or five human uh connection emotions that we can pull on and connect with each other about. So, a want and a need, like I said, about being feeling seen and heard. So if you post at people and talk at them, and you want to create this like breakthrough of, hey, I want to listen to this podcast. Well, what is a want and a need for somebody on the other side of this podcast? Maybe that's to make sure every time they listen to this podcast, they get one new tool that they didn't know about. Maybe in this one, it's Bardeen, for example. Go check out Bardeen. Not that I'm selling them, I have no connection. But there's a want and a need on the other side that we're trying to fill for humans, and it's really not that complicated over here. So I feel like what makes that win is just taking these like a huge list over here and just dialing it down into only five things over on the right hand side. And AI can help me do that, it can simplify the wants and needs into what really is happening.

SPEAKER_04: 52:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 52:50

Because even your wants and needs are human.

SPEAKER_04: 52:52

Yeah. Say that last part again.

SPEAKER_01: 52:55

Even your wants and needs are human. You just don't like you're saying, I want more followers on the company page because it translates to more people being um at our next event, for example. That is a want and a need that is I'm going back to maybe Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

SPEAKER_02: 53:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 53:15

It's uh, we need our business to be sustainable. We need to project sustainability because our stakeholders expect a return on investment or whatever that looks like, it is part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And I probably saw that so clearly going through a house fire and breaking in, breaking my arm back to back because I saw how strong all of what we're doing as we spend time on this planet is literally driven by our human core wants and needs over here. But all these wants and uh the thing that overwhelms us or creates analysis paralysis is this like laundry list of shopping. Like I have all these things I have to do, but really there's only five departments in the grocery store I need to actually go visit. That sounds that's a simple analogy, but the huge shopping list. Imagine if you were able to quickly create a category. This is the fruits and vegetables section, this is the dairy section, this is it's not as complicated as we think it is.

SPEAKER_04: 54:24

Yeah, you know, before Alexa, hopefully she doesn't start asking.

SPEAKER_01: 54:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 54:29

What what what are you asking? Um there it is. Okay. Before before that program it was for grocery shopping, it's it's about okay, what what items do I need for these meals? And you plug them in or you you write them on a list, maybe. If if on a good week you're typing them in to your phone in a note or something like that. But now you tell it whenever, wherever you are in your house, and you say, Alexa, add this to the list. And it'll go and sort it for you. So when you get to the grocery store, you open that app and you look at your list, and you're already in the fruits and vegetables section because the produce is always kind of the first thing that you see, and and that's where you go and you get your stuff and you move to the next section. I think that what what would be really cool is if you could take AI and say, Oh, here's my grocery store. Now go ahead and tell me where I'm gonna find these things as I'm walking this the map of the grocery store. And so if I haven't picked up the peanuts before the you know the crackers, it's because the peanuts would logically come after the crackers. Like that would be really interesting to me. Anyway, I'm I'm going off on a tangent there.

SPEAKER_01: 55:56

But honestly, uh it's all about AI can simplify.

SPEAKER_04: 56:00

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 56:02

But it only if you know to talk to it like that. Like you don't make everything complicated because I've seen it do it. And I'm like, hey, can you dial that back to just the top two or three things? What do you like? I'll I'll ask it. What do you think I'm really trying to say here? What do you think is the actual undercurrent of the problems that I'm stating? And I just don't know if that's a prompt people use very often.

SPEAKER_04: 56:28

I'm gonna try it. Yeah, something else I'm stealing from you.

SPEAKER_01: 56:32

It's all like AI can see things that can help you. You know, I love when somebody will say, This person just launched a new book, they've uploaded their entire book to AI. And if I chat with it, I understand this person has a lot of knowledge, but I'll say something like, Hey, AI, based on everything you know about me and this book, if you simplified three concepts for me, what would those be? What do you think I actually need to take away based on what you know about me? Because the world is just full of knowledge and everything. But if I want to break through analysis, paralysis, I have to simplify.

SPEAKER_04: 57:11

Yes. I I think the theme here is like targeting what you want the tool to do for you, creating that that right that correct problem statement and getting focus, narrowing your focus. Um just uh just off the side, where uh where does the human psychology um like comprehension in your world come from? Did you have a minor in that? Did you recognize early on in your your influencing career that you needed to deeply understand how humans connect to one another?

SPEAKER_01: 57:48

Like where what's your I would say it comes from two places. Number one is I received as an off-the-cuff, like, here's a bunch of tapes on uh tape decks, like the old-fashioned uh tape decks, if you don't know what we're talking about. And I listened to the talk, the the top National Speakers Association award winner talks. That's what this whole tape deck, it was like a huge box full of the top talks from the National Speakers Association, going all the way back to 1960s, 1970s. It was all the talk, top talks. And I consumed them on every commute, road trip. We're talking years and years of just repeat listening to these talks. And I don't know why I was drawn to them. Somebody just randomly handed them, they were gonna throw them away. And I was like, okay, sure, I'll take them. But what ended up happening was as I was listening to these to these talks, I realized these are moving people, these are inspiring people. And there's something really deep and powerful here. And as I was listening to them, I was also starting to attend things like Toastmasters. How do you communicate your ideas to the world? Because nobody listens to you unless you've learned how to communicate your voice, your ideas. And that's going to be the difference. That was the difference I was seeing between anyone I was trying to listen to and my boss, my teams, who I was working with. And I got into the role of project management for uh United States Gypsum Corporation. I worked with International Paper, worked with Kraft, worked with Tesla. So all those projects and teams, everything always came to your communication skills every single time. And it, as I just kept growing in my career. I kept saying the more I can figure out human psychology, communication skills, networking, I will be okay as a human on this planet. And I, if I go back to even like Victor Frankel's The Meaning of Life, I think I can't remember if that's the title of his book.

SPEAKER_04: 1:00:20

Sounds familiar. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:21

I just know Victor Frankel. I mean, I've I've studied Peter Drucker. Um, I love all the language of how do you actually get the work done? Because everything I was trying to do in project management related to how did I motivate a team, how did I get buy-in from upper management all the way to the worker who was going to perform the project. I actually was in charge of the uh bridge expansion of the uh a bridge in Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics. That was my project that I ran and had to work with um BC Hydro, BNSF, like all the landowners that owned the property underneath this bridge, which is insane. I didn't even realize all the different stakeholders and navigating that. And that pushed my communication to the nth degree because I had to get everyone to agree to a lot of different project scopes and everyone had different opinions. Ugh, it was crazy, a lot of red tape. Yes, but to push that project forward to meet the deadline of the 2010 Olympics, people wouldn't even realize that a bridge had to be expanded for that, for the 2010 Olympics to go forward, which is crazy that I was the project manager for that bridge and the pilot and what was happening underneath that bridge.

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:48

So I I bet you talked to a lot of lawyers.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:51

Yes, a lot of community evangelists, advanced, uh permitting. Then, of course, the teams coming to physically do the work. I was the person everyone reported into and doing all the financial, like I was the project manager for that entire project. So I will say it all came down to communication skills. Every single time I could look back on my career, and I had a really good boss at one point say, if you can figure out human psychology and communication, your engineering career, your business career will go further.

SPEAKER_04: 1:02:32

So true. There you go. I found myself, I yeah, I found myself in a fix with communication a few years ago. I'd say it was 2018-ish. And heard learned about Toastmasters and joined up with that organization. Um found a nice little club I could attend every week, and it just expanded my world so much and so fast. I will forever be grateful for the services that they offer. And that's a but that's a different podcast, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:07

But I definitely I uploaded one of my talks because I made it all the way to one of the top humorous talks of our local state, like area, region, maybe. I think it was a regional Toastmasters event. So I made it to the top three of that, and I uploaded that talk on LinkedIn, and I think I got like maybe 50,000 views on that talk.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:31

So I'm gonna go check that out.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:33

It is very it's it's old. It's a you know, back in the olden days when you probably just had this like terrible camera to record on a VHS or something.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:42

I'm kidding, but well, before there were there before there was streaming, there were there were uh CDs and DVDs, and before that there were VHS tapes and cassette tapes, and before that there were A-Track and Yada yada um albums, which are making a big comeback these days, I guess.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:03

I know. I just got out my CDs just to be like, I'm playing my CDs, I'm a CD player. I wish I kept all these tapes. I wish I had tape cassettes. But I will say, um, a lot of people hear like, oh, you know, you came busting onto the scene, and I I really started uploading video 2018 as like a really active content creator in 2017-2018. But I can go all the way back to my very first online viral moment. I went viral on Google Plus, which that's a super random story. In the early days of the internet, I had a piece of content get reposted and shared by 7,000 people. So it went mega viral. I ended up with so much visibility, and it was so impactful back then. But people will, I will tell people my understanding of virality and being able to push out your voice and how to leverage your communication skills on the internet goes all the way back to the early 2000s. So it's not a one-hit wonder.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:11

No, no, you don't learn these skills overnight. Yeah, absolutely not.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:15

I've been pushing on these skills. I just wish I had really leaned into some some of the early days of YouTube. I wish. I wish.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:24

Yeah. Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:27

For another time.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:28

I think you're doing, I think you're doing pretty well there, Judy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:30

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:31

Yeah. All right. Last question for you. What's one thing you hope people take away from this conversation about being real in a world increasingly run by machines?

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:45

That it's okay to not scale your voice at the expense of AI slop. Please recognize that more content is not going to always be your answer. It may actually hurt your entire business structure.

unknown: 1:06:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:02

Your reputation. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:05

AI can amplify you. Don't let AI just amplify itself.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:10

Yeah. Use the algorithm, but don't become the algorithm.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:17

Sweet.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:18

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:19

Hey, you know what? I have one more question. It's a fun question. And it's a little bit of a curveball that I ask at the end of all of my interviews. If you had one superpower, Judy Fox, what would it be and why?

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:32

Uh I've I don't this, I'm just gonna say what I always say, which is I wish I didn't have to sleep. Yeah, I wish I could have all the energy every day of a human that never had to sleep. I don't think I want to stay alive forever, unless everyone else can stay alive forever, but I'll know. Oh, I just really wish I could have the energy of a human that's always fully rested.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:59

Oh my god, that would be amazing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:01

I know. It just seems like such a great superpower to have for your whole life. If you have a finite life, I would love to always just have that good vibes, good energy every day. I mean, there's a lot of other things you could have in life, but if you had that much clarity and that much fully rested sleeping energy, you would probably just have the best life.

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:23

Best. I I a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:26

You might show my age. I want good sleep.

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:30

No, I I I pick I picked up on the need in my you know early 40s and found that um I can no longer you know party like a rock star and I can no longer you know stay up really late and you know, watching endless uh reels of whatever it is. And if I want to get up early and and and get that worm, you know, it's you gotta get it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:51

Why I'm drawn to sh to movies that do that uh groundhogs day where every day is the same, it makes my brain think, oh wow, what if they got good sleep every single day? Like, you know, literally, literally the movie Groundhog's Day, because he gets to actually um improve himself, learn piano, do all these things. I don't know if I would want to live in a Groundhog's Day, but the equivalent to me is just waking up every day super well rested and never having to realize there was any issues with sleeping. Just, ah, wake up every day like it is the best day, and you had the best feeling, and you woke up so relaxed and so energetic.

SPEAKER_04: 1:08:33

Yeah, it it is it is worth considering what you could get out of that situation. And like we've been talking about, channel your focus to those goals because every day can be like that without having to live the groundhog's day loop. Yeah, you know, it can be. You just have to apply yourself and do the hard thing up front. I heard a quote recently about doing the hard thing because life's gonna be hard regardless of what you do. So if you if you work hard to get what you want, it's gonna be challenging and difficult, but it's better than having to work hard because the thing that you got wasn't what you wanted. So you're gonna have to live through it the difficult times no matter what. Yeah. Um, so but it's your choice in whether or not you live the difficult life the way you imagine it or the way somebody else imagines it for you.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:32

That's how I feel about my fox ears and my foxes in the background. I might as well lean in. There's and if I why not have some fun while doing business. You can still have you can, I think you're gonna have better results in life if you're actually having fun while you do some things on this planet here.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:48

So 100%. Yeah. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:50

Yeah, this has been so much fun.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:53

Yes, and we're right on time.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:55

Yay, perfect.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:57

This this was um such a pleasure. Uh thank you for spending the afternoon with me and sharing your experience, um, your passion that that you've uh you obviously have a wonderful talent for. And um, I do look forward to seeing you again at the next AI Ready RVA. I know, I gotta get back out to the I need to figure out like which ones you go to.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:20

Um I'm officially a member of AI Ready RVA.

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:25

I oh thank you for your support.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:27

Yes, I just have to attend some more.

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:31

Yeah. Well, we'll maybe we'll do another one of these again in the future.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:35

We'll see how uh how our reporting to you from an AI ready event.

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:43

All right, it's it's coming. You heard it first.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:46

Perfect.

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:47

All right, thank you, Judy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:49

Thank you.